1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to the field of computer software and, more specifically, to Internet related computer software.
2. Description of Related Art
The xe2x80x9cInternetxe2x80x9d is a globally accessible network of computers that collectively provide a large amount and variety of information to users. From services of the Internet such as the World Wide Web (or simply, the xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d), users may retrieve or xe2x80x9cdownloadxe2x80x9d data from Internet network sites and display the data that includes information presented as text in various fonts, graphics, images, and the like having an appearance intended by the publisher. As the information revolution has exploded, more and more information is available through the internet. However, finding particular pieces of information out of the millions of xe2x80x9cweb sitesxe2x80x9d available can be daunting.
One way of sorting through this mass of information to find what is of interest for a particular user is through the use of xe2x80x9csearch enginesxe2x80x9d. Search engines are software written to search, among the millions of web sites, for certain key words or criteria entered by a user, and to return to the user a list of links (references to other HTML pages) to the sites that the search engine determines to be relevant to the criteria entered by the user. Different search engines use different methods of determining the relevance of web sites, but most use some sort of quantitative method that determines the relevance of a site based on how many times the key words appear in that particular site.
Search engines typically return a list of links to relevant sites with perhaps a short verbal description of the site. A typical example of a screen image returned by a search engine is illustrated in FIG. 1. Notice that each link is represented only with a textual name followed by a short textual description of the linked page. Often times, this does not provide sufficient information to enable one to make an intelligent decision as to whether to follow the link. Thus, the user is left with the time consuming task of sorting through the links returned by the search engine to determine which of these is the best match. Furthermore, there is no way for a user to determine based on the search engine results whether the site or web page is still active or if it has been removed.
Similar problems exist with regard to following links from one web page to another (sometimes referred to as xe2x80x9cweb surfingxe2x80x9d). Often times, users find the information they are looking for by following links on web pages, but the same problem exists here as with search engines. Many times, the links will have only short descriptions about the contents of the web page to which they linkxe2x80x94usually, just a highlighted word. Furthermore, a web page will often contain a dead link and there is no way the user can determine this except by trial and error. Therefore, it would be beneficial for Internet users to have a tool to enable them to make more informed decisions about which links to follow.
The present invention provides a method for presenting content from the page in a distributed database. In a preferred embodiments a page of data from the database is presented to a user. The page has a plurality of links to linked pages in the database. A set of thumbnail images of the linked pages in the database is presented to the user near the links to the linked pages.